Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[nativewolf]

Things take time. Re-usable rockets was absolutely pie in the sky. Now its so routine elon doesn't even tweet each launch. How long has elon held X? not long, and the feature improvements have been 50x faster and better than when it had its old lazy and incompetent management.

Robotaxi could easily destroy uber, because no driver means no wages, no healthcare, no HR. And uber is just one company. Add lyft, and every other global ride share company. Then add every taxi company too. Even taking 10% of that globally is insane.
Imagine a situation where robotaxis are available. Does a single woman going home late at night in a city call a robotaxi, or some random car with a random guy driving it (uber/taxi).
Frankly even being able to set temperature and music to your liking in a taxi is worth $ to me. Being able to avoid talking to the driver is worth $ to me. And I'm not a guy who would ever feel unsafe in a taxi.

Yes and spacex still has 1 q of profit. 1. Since inceptions. They wouldn't have any without huge govt subsidies via silly $ that nasa spends. I love space exploration but Spacex is a business case in how to minimize constant and ongoing forever losses, not how to make profit.

Uber is a terrible business, it was a capital destroying pig that has only just started making slim profits and Waymo will gut them in the USA before Tesla gets there to do it. Though much of Waymos profit comes from outside the USA, Brazil for example. Where art though RT profits then? Will Tesla and Waymo go to 0 margins to win business. Economic theory says they will. Remember, profits are all in dense urban areas and it is not likely to change anytime soon. When Tesla can do RT, profitably, outside dense urban areas then and only then will it have a differentiation.

My skepticism on TaaS only grows. I believe the idea that RT will replace individual ownership is deeply flawed. When phones became mobile and then smart phones it didn't cause families to share phones...no, it led to everyone owning 1 or even 2 phones. I believe any deep dive into the modern movement of people in industrial and post industrial society will expose flaws in Tony Sebas musings. He predicted TaaS would be widely more successful by now than it has been. It's easy to see why he was wrong if you peel back Ubers business if you understand how and why people move.

 

[nativewolf]

I think in this case, many of us are simply very confused as to the "why". Superchargers were a profitable division of Tesla on their own, one absolutely required for EV adoption, not only for Tesla now but every OEM in the US. To fire the entire SC team out of nowhere, well I think its understandable that many people are both confused and concerned about this.

Elon might have very good reasons and he might have a great plan, unfortunately no one seems to know what that is currently. Thus, people here trying to create reason out of what appears to be madness.

That is because he left the country and fired them while away so he could avoid answering the question. This in and of itself...raises questions.

 

[Usain]

I believe any deep dive into the modern movement of people in industrial and post industrial society will expose flaws in Tony Sebas musings. He predicted TaaS would be widely more successful by now than it has been.

Link?

 

[Dangerous Fish]

Here's a photo of a UK SuC site in a big city (Bristol) which appeared on FB this morning. It's just been opened up to non-Teslas
Some of the comments:
"That's what happens when you fire all the staff"
"Seriously though they’re under used. Was like that last time I went there"
"they're well hidden."
"it’s no surprise they’re empty as finding them was an adventure in itself!"

It's not uncommon for SuC sites in the UK to be hard to find, especially in multi-storey car parks where the sat-nav doesn't lead you to the correct floor or precise location and signage is poor.
They are billed as "24hr" but the mall (not 24hr) has to be open to allow access.
Lots of negative reviews about poor directions/signage leading to drivers giving up and going to another SuC nearby.
Is that why they're under-utilized?
They get a lot more use at weekends when shoppers are visiting the mall, but that's surely not what large SuC site's main purpose is?
This SuC location has been in use since 2014, when is started with 2 x SuC stalls.
Could this have been done better? I don't know, but it raises questions in my mind and it's not an isolated example IME.

 

[CHGolferJim]

Not even close. Modi winning the election is a foregone conclusion, even by the opposition, many say by even a bigger margin. The opposition alliance have not even announced a PM candidate yet, as they know there is no point. There are 5 candidates from that alliance vying to position themselves as the leader of the pack, each one trying to undermine the other.

Modi needs Elon no doubt to modernize his country and get to the EV and renewable era, but for scoring brownie points for elections? you gotto be kidding . But Elon's cancellation is being played up as a snub to Modi by the opposition politicians.

As per election commission rules the ruling party cannot sign or announce deals with any entity that can be seen as influencing voters. I am guessing that played a part in Elon waiting for the elections to be over.

Also, delaying for the China news is a jab and wake-up call to the Indian decision-maker(s) slow-footing prior to the election.

 

[advocate8]

Elon going hard core on loyalty ,

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785405979573514425

If you think about it, it might make more sense for employees at the nearest service center to pick the sites since they are local.

Not at all. Needs to be done with serious traffic flow data. Not some yokel in local service center putting it at his brother in law’s strip club.

 

[CHGolferJim]

I wouldn't worry too much about Tesla employees that are laid off. Golden parachutes tend to happen. It's a near certainty they got snagged very quickly, with many offers, and with lucrative offers at that.

Yeah, but they won’t get to work for Tesla anymore — where they worked hard, and loved their work and the company. The company will suffer in execution if it turns into a sweatshop where people work hard largely because of threat, in that kind of environment the mission becomes lip service and another stick to hold over peoples’ heads.

 

[winfield100]

Amen. I know one too.
Reasoning: Less stress, pays for itself vs insurance rate from Tesla before FSD, when I die I can say I drove EV and EV with FSD. How many b4 me can say that?

OT OT OT
@GOVA
well, you now know 2, as I'm doing a 2,500+ mile trip in a few days, just got 12.3.6 so FSD(supervised) for at least another month $99, plus insurance needs "more data"

 

[sunwarriors]

Remember the histeria after Elon fired 80% of the people at twitter. People were saying how people had to be un-fired, servers were hours away from going down, lots of left wing celebs were saying their goodbyes...the entire world was laughing at Elon for not knowing wtf he was doing.

Somehow with 25% of the staff, twitter still works 1.5 years later.

I doubted the folks who were saying twitter site was going to shutdown/crash and burn as well, but the jury is still out on whether Twitter will be a success. It's one thing to freeze everything and keep a site up and running vs. actually turning around the business and making it profitable/successful.

I don't think it's debatable that Twitter is not worth $44 billion yet so it's still not successful at this time, but Elon is mega rich and he has stated he doesn't care about $$ so he can keep it running forever no matter what happens.

Folks who thought Twitter would instantly shutdown were definitely idiots.

 

[DarkandStormy]

Amen. I know one too.
Reasoning: Less stress, pays for itself vs insurance rate from Tesla before FSD, when I die I can say I drove EV and EV with FSD. How many b4 me can say that?

This is a super weird bucket list item.

 

[Brunel]

View attachment 1043390

Here's a photo of a UK SuC site in a big city (Bristol) which appeared on FB this morning. It's just been opened up to non-Teslas
Some of the comments:
"That's what happens when you fire all the staff"
"Seriously though they’re under used. Was like that last time I went there"
"they're well hidden."
"it’s no surprise they’re empty as finding them was an adventure in itself!"

It's not uncommon for SuC sites in the UK to be hard to find, especially in multi-storey car parks where the sat-nav doesn't lead you to the correct floor or precise location and signage is poor.
They are billed as "24hr" but the mall (not 24hr) has to be open to allow access.
Lots of negative reviews about poor directions/signage leading to drivers giving up and going to another SuC nearby.
Is that why they're under-utilized?
They get a lot more use at weekends when shoppers are visiting the mall, but that's surely not what large SuC site's main purpose is?
This SuC location has been in use since 2014, when is started with 2 x SuC stalls.
Could this have been done better? I don't know, but it raises questions in my mind and it's not an isolated example IME.

I wonder if your questions are just based on the one photo and sarcastic comments on FB or whether you have been to this SuC. This SuC is 3 miles away from me and is next to the largest shopping mall in the South West of England. It gets very busy during the day and can be full with Tesla vehicles - the Tesla Service Centre is 200 yards away and they often use it too. A lot of travellers going down to the South Coast stop here rather than the congested and slow V2 5 miles down the motorway at Gordano. Personally, this was a very clever expansion site. Looking at the app right now there are 4 stalls free (maybe not if charge-port on wrong side car is charging ). That said there are sites that are not busy even at lunch rush hour and Colchester is a good example, but bizarrely that has not been opened up to non-Tesla this past weekend!

 

[willow_hiller]

Tidbit of news about the next generation of Dojo from TSMC at the North American Technology Symposium. The stated timeline is to expand the reticle limit to 5.5 by 2026, which would enable 3.5 times the compute, and full wafer integration by 2027 which enables 40 times the compute.

Expect a Wave of Wafer-Scale Computers

TSMC tech allows for one version now and a more advanced version in 2027

spectrum.ieee.org

[T]he company detailed both its semiconductor technology and chip-packaging technology road maps. While the former is key to keeping the traditional part of Moore’s Law going, the latter could accelerate a trend toward processors made from more and more silicon, leading quickly to systems the size of a full silicon wafer. Such a system, Tesla’s next generation Dojo training tile is already in production, TSMC says. And in 2027 the foundry plans to offer technology for more complex wafer-scale systems than Tesla’s that could deliver 40 times as much computing power as today’s systems.
...
However, with its first round of System-on-Wafer, TSMC is offering a different solution to the problems of both reticle limit and yield. It starts with already tested logic dies to minimize defects. (Tesla’s Dojo contains a 5-by-5 grid of pretested processors.) These are placed on a carrier wafer, and the blank spots between the dies are filled in. Then a layer of high-density interconnects is constructed to connect the logic using TSMC’s integrated fan-out technology. The aim is to make data bandwidth among the dies so high that they effectively act like a single large chip.

 

[samppa]

Our government has pushed for fast chargers with a lot of incentives. The end result is that there are fast chargers everywhere. I count at least 20 locations in the immediate (let’s say 5 to 10 minutes drive) neighbourhood of my local highway exit. They all charge around 0,85 €/kWh. They are also regularly used so I presume reliability is not much of an issue anymore.
So the Supercharger moat is already gone here, in the sense that availability is not an issue anymore.
The biggest advantage of the SUC network currently are the cheap prices.
Tesla probably needs a lot of stalls per site to make the cheap prices work, so maybe this is the direction Elon wants to go.
The MSM still shouts that there are not enough chargers.
Other countries may be 1 or 2 years behind in fast charger penetration.

In a sense yes. But roadtripping in Europe to other countries and trying to use other than Tesla chargers is a nightmare.
I drove last summer through Sweden to Denmark, tried to charge a couple times at a different fast charger and it was just impossible. Process:

1. Download some danish app, thats completely in Danish, which I try to make sense with google translate
2. Try to enter a my Finnish credit card details, then 2FA through my finnish bank, which the app for some reason did not accept
3. finally it accepted the card after a few tries
4. charger cannot be started with the app but requires a rfid tag for some reason
5. Give up and drive to nearest Tesla SuC

Hah also Lidl chargers would not work with my Finnish lidl account, and lidl app would not let me register a danish account because it defaulted to the finnish account

Finlands ABC service station chain has quite an extensive charger network, price is 0,33€/kwh so quite ok. I can guarantee if you want to use their app for charging as a foreigner, its gonna be another nightmare

 

[Dangerous Fish]

I wonder if your questions are just based on the one photo and sarcastic comments on FB or whether you have been to this SuC. This SuC is 3 miles away from me and is next to the largest shopping mall in the South West of England. It gets very busy during the day and can be full with Tesla vehicles - the Tesla Service Centre is 200 yards away and they often use it too. A lot of travellers going down to the South Coast stop here rather than the congested and slow V2 5 miles down the motorway at Gordano. Personally, this was a very clever expansion site. Looking at the app right now there are 4 stalls free (maybe not if charge-port on wrong side car is charging ). That said there are sites that are not busy even at lunch rush hour and Colchester is a good example, but bizarrely that has not been opened up to non-Tesla this past weekend!

As I said at the end "could this have been done better? I don't know". I haven't been to that site but in similar mall-based sites I've had similar experiences, especially when it comes to finding the chargers in the first place.
I realise utilization is a moving target, but other concerns like location, signage, opening hours, how safe people feel there at night, local refreshsments, amenities are all important considerations which start at the planning stage and take a long time to pan out.
Maybe the whole planning/implementation side of SuC rollout across the world just hasn't gone the way Musk envisioned and with the current financial situation it's come to a head and he wants to pause and reset?
Or he's sold it all or some other reason. It's all speculation and that's all I'm doing which is not really helpful TBH so I'll probably stop now,

 

[unk45]

The mountains of Appalachia are a very popular tourist destination - we have a home near the middle of the map below.

This hardly seems like the time to slow down expansion.

As a frequent traveler to that area I concur! OTOH, just a slight increase in map scope does include some good options. Even so, all over the Tesla world there are geographic gaps. We have been regularly stating that non-Tesla charging is to be profitable, margins unclear. Covering lesss deeply entrenched Tesla-owning ares that are still Tesla-traveled recreational or business route seems likely to add to profitability.
Maintenance and management will be necessarily more expensive per incident. is that a major impediment? Probably not. Even seasonal temporary Superchargers could handle places like our creator's oft-mentioned Denali Highway, Mount Everest Base Camp, many ski resorts etc.

The real question might be: Will the wholesale restructuring of the Supercharger team accelerate or deter such solutions? additionally: Will the concentration on increased density in existing locations inhibit temporary/seasonal locations? ...accelerate them?

Based on the announcements we now haven't a clue what will happen. We do know these are 'interesting times". Hopefully not the ancient Chinese curse type of 'interesting times'.

 

[Christine69420]

99*12=1188 USD per year and user gives 2.4 billion USD in additional revenues per year if we count on 2 million subscribers

26,000 sold cars per month * 12 * 40,000 (approximate average selling price) would give 12.5 billion USD in additional annual revenues.

Or am I missing something?

2 mill subscribers (your number) * $99 is 198 mill per month
ASP-COGS for Tesla cars is about $7000 (from memory)
198 mill / 7000 is equivalent to the profit of approx 28,000 cars

This per month.

But it is clearly not 100% not even close. The effort to maintain FSD will be significant.

True - but they already do that. Those $99 adds up to additional profit.

 

[nativewolf]

Link?

Dozens if not hundreds of studies. Here is one. I didn't need any studies to come up with the idea, Tony's ideas were intriguing and I actually studied them. I didn't think what I saw supported his assertions. In fact every study since has found the same thing. TaaS is not good for sustainability. Will RTs be different? Not initially according to everything we see in CA and Phoenix. In fact, RT may be worse than Uber.

Uber and Lyft drive US gridlock — but not cuts in car ownership

In the United States, ride-share services lure passengers away from public transit instead of luring drivers into giving up their private vehicles.

www.nature.com

 

[growler23]

Anyone who is invested in Tesla should probably invest some time in reading/ listening to Walter Isaacson’s biography.

Elon is in “Demon Mode”. As his ex-girlfriend said, it’s harsh, but it gets sh** done.

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/elon-musk-demon-mode/69f38af7-7caf-47e2-b853-14448d807909

That's what I think happened here. We already knew Elon was in War Mode with the AI/robotaxi refocus (Demon Mode from the biography, if you will).
We don't know, just more speculation, but given that he sent that warning tweet about all managers needing to cut ~10% of their workforce, I speculate that the Supercharger managers refused or failed to do this. Elon, with that tweet out there and being in war mode, felt he had to make a dramatic response to what could be seen as a challenge to his full executive authority in the company. That sort of challenge, IMO, he can not and will not abide - especially not now that he is in War Mode / Turn the Ship mode. So the managers get tossed, and the team gets tossed to make the point, and the stuff about "redirecting" how the SC team focuses going forward, while true, is largely unrelated to the mass firing.
I am personally still unsettled about this happening. However, I also still remember that Elon has made many unconventional decisions and has had literally world-changing results from his unconventional management.

 

[unk45]

My .02 on Supercharging on our April 6th solar eclipse road trip from L.A. to TX in our Long Range Model Y
Our first day plan is to get to Deming, NM, about 700 miles


Left home at 6AM at 100%,
First charge stop is at Morongo just off the 10 freeway
250 kw Chargers located near the 24hr convenience store
No waiting, and near all the gas pumps, so u can grab windshield washer if u need it.

That gives us enough charge to get us up the hill and along to the CA/AZ border.


Next stop Quartzsite, AZ

We plugged in at the solar canopy covered 80 250kw stalls, and there is another 20 something stalls less than a quarter mile away.


Grabbed a coffee at the “Terribles” convenience store, walked around the chargers for some exercise, then after about 25 minutes we’re on our way.

Next charge stop is Buckeye, AZ just before Phoenix
These are 150kw, and this where things start to slow down, the chargers are all in use, and our charger gives us 34kw.

We walk around the mall area twice, and stop inside some of the big box stores.

After about 35 minutes we have enough charge to get us to Casa Grande, AZ

Casa Grande is another 150kw, and only 6 stalls, same slow charge as at Buckeye.

We have lunch at Culver’s restaurant next to the chargers, and since it is slow charging we decided to continue to the next charging stop at Tucson

The Tucson West River Road 250kw Superchargers we go to are about 3 miles off the freeway, which adds time.
After charging in Tucson, we have enough charge to get to the 150kw Superchargers at Wilcox, AZ, so off we go.

Now, this is where the in-vehicle UI fails us.

The Supercharger UI in our vehicle shows 8 stalls at Wilcox, and all stalls available, so we drive past the Superchargers south of Tucson at the Pilot station, and continue to Wilcox. Approximately 30 miles outside of Wilcox, the UI says, no stalls available and greater than 25 minute wait! If we had known this we could have charged at the last Superchargers just past Tucson, and made it to Deming, NM.
As we pull into the Superchargers in Wilcox, there is a long line of around 20 Teslas. At least two of the stalls are non-working.

There is a friendly vibe among the Tesla folk, and one guy informs us it will be about 2 hours from where we are in line to get to a charger.
It was about 3 hours later when we leave Wilcox, and we get to Deming, NM at 10pm.









The rest of the trip was mostly smooth, luckily a new 250 kw Supercharger had just opened in Ozona, TX, and we did bypass a 2 hour wait at the Superchargers in Fort Stockton, TX on the way back.

The Supercharger Network got stress tested in many States during the eclipse, and it had quite a few points of failure

My thoughts; Yes, the permitting process for new Superchargers is slow, so the first order of business would be to upgrade all 150kw to 250kw

And also, fix the UI to actually show the reality of what is happening at all Superchargers, so that anyone road tripping can know exactly what the situation is.

This is a useful post. Those who were raid tipping across the US and EU back in 2014-2015 don't really understand. There are many such global Supercharger installations, I just realized after doing some checking inspired by your post, located in important areas that were initially installed in early years and never updated. This post makes me understand one reason Elon described the priorities thusly. Fort Stockton and Wilcox were two I visited in 'ancient times' back when 120 kw was magical. Those are two prototypical problem area throughout the oldest Europe and China locations, not center urban, but road trip intense.

Suddenly, my old-era eyes were enlightened.

 

[Ellec]

I don't really care that much what you think I should invest in, to be honest. I am heavily invested in Tesla because it is quite easy to see the shift from ICE to EV, I don't believe it will stop despite the slightly slower pace the past year, and I think Tesla will continue to benefit greatly from this shift. There are lots of other opportunities in Tesla that I am curious about and want to understand better, which is one of the reasons I participate in this forum. If you feel that my contributions are uninteresting or pointless, feel free to use the ignore function, I wont take offense, I promise.

Fair enough, I was just paraphrasing what Elon said, I don't feel your contributions are pointless, I was just pointing out with autonomy/FSD there is a larger opportunity. Especially if they are first and then license it out to other manufacturers and increase volume. One scenario is FSD is so good non FSD cars could be forced off the road if they don't have it due to regulations or very high insurance premiums. So think tens of million cars paying $499 a month.